No longer an esoteric sci-fi concept, AI is emerging in almost all aspects of our online lives. From conversational search on smartphones to AI-driven search results, we’re now using it to quickly get information on any topic under the sun. There has been a clear shift towards using AI-driven search as more tools like Google Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity emerge.
This has impacted across industries. We’re seeing significant changes in AI chatbot traffic in automotive searches, which is particularly affecting Australian car-review sites. Where previously people typed queries into search engines and got a list of websites containing the relevant information, a lot of this info is now being generated by AI chatbots and inserted into the search engine results pages (SERPs). As a result, people see their answers right there, and don’t click through to the actual websites. These AI-driven search results create what are called “zero-click searches”. The net result is a drop in click-through rates (CTR) and website visitors.
Furthermore, when people use AI tools rather than search engines, like ChatGPT car reviews, they see all the info they want right there in the ChatGPT interface. This eliminates the whole concept of search results, exacerbating the CTR decrease. Such loss of traffic (and potential customers) highlights the urgency of AI-informed automotive SEO for Australian car review sites.
It’s clear that AI chatbots are not just reshaping search traffic—they’re fundamentally rewriting the rules. At Bring, we believe brands still heavily reliant on paid search or traditional SEO will be the first casualties. If you’re not optimising explicitly for conversational search, structured data, and niche-specific content tailored for AI, you’re actively choosing to fall behind.
The data we’ve examined starkly shows that a paid search-only approach is a very risky long-term strategy. Paid search alone is unsustainable in the face of growing AI chatbot traffic. Brands need to diversify urgently to remain relevant. We’ll discuss why in this article.
However, as AI chatbot traffic on automotive websites increases, it also opens new opportunities for establishing online authority and visibility. Let’s take a deep dive into the trends and statistics, and how to capture and grow AI chatbot traffic.
Current Marketing Channels & Traffic Trends
Below you can see the year-on-year traffic shifts for some of Australia’s most prominent car-review websites.
Figure 1: Channel growth overview for major Australian car-review sites.
Moving from left to right, we see that CarExpert has seen small dips across organic search and other referrals, dropping by about 4.4%. WhichCar has been particularly hard hit, recording a 37.8% decrease. The graph specifically highlights significant underperformance in organic and paid search traffic.
Things have been less dramatic for CarsGuide at -1.7%, which is stable, but still in negative territory. Drive only saw a 1% dip, but that was on the back of a 300% increase in paid search. In other words, they spent their way around the challenges. We believe that the Drive example very clearly shows why relying on paid search is such a risky strategy in the long term. The costs have soared exponentially and even then the net result was negative. The law of diminishing returns will inevitably catch up to companies that stick to paid search alone.
Only Exhaust Notes bucked the trend with a whopping 66% increase in traffic. Most of these were referrals (increasing by 400%), indicating a successful focus on organic strategies like link-building and niche content marketing. Paid search also played a role. The large proportion of direct traffic shows that strong brand authority and recognition was another very important factor.
We reached out to Mark Holgate from Exhaust Notes to elaborate: “We’ve seen significant growth in referrals to our website and in organic traffic thanks to a focus on building our presence through paid search, as well as link building with both car and motorcycle brands.”
“The latter,” he continues, “has allowed us to gain additional brand recognition and traffic flow by having car and motorcycle brands lift quotes from our reviews and news content, and then utilise it on their own websites as positive feedback for their vehicles.”
Our conclusion? Paid search appears to be the least successful tactic for niche websites.
Key Bring Takeaways
- Paid search traffic is showing a continuous downward trend.
- Relying on paid search alone is now a very risky strategy.
- Niche content is a powerful way of attracting traffic.
Organic Search Performance Trends for Australian car-review sites
Looking at trends on organic traffic to automotive websites over the last year provides more useful insights.
Figure 2: Organic search share for main Australian car-review sites (Jul 2024 – Jun 2025).
Here we see that, contrary to the first graph, Exhaust Notes received less than 2% of organic traffic going to the five car-review websites. This can be explained by the channel growth numbers in Figure 1. With the vast majority of traffic coming from a combination of referrals and direct site visits, it makes sense that it received fewer organic visits than the others.
WhichCar’s woes continue here though. The site received only 5.2% of the organic traffic. Combined with its large negative channel growth figures, this indicates that the site is struggling to create a successful strategy focusing on this high-intent vertical, where users are searching for model-specific information. It also shows a lack of authority among search engines.
CarExpert gained a respectable 19.3% share, with a spike in April 2025 suggesting a successful marketing campaign during the month. At the same time, the other sites also saw small spikes at the same time, so this could be due to unrelated external factors that affected them all.
Most of the traffic was shared between CarsGuide and Drive, at 39.7% and 35.7%, respectively. These two car-review sites dominate, together receiving about 75% of all organic search traffic over the period.
Key Bring Takeaways
- Organic search is dominated by two main players.
- A strong organic SEO strategy can overcome losses in paid search traffic.
- Online brand authority plays a decisive role.
User Intent from AI & Chatbot Prompts
Understanding user intent and providing information that satisfies it are the cornerstones of all search engine efforts. Taking another data set of AI chatbot traffic to automotive Australian car-review sites, we can see clear differences in the kinds of user prompts that made automotive AI chatbots in Australia visit the car-review websites for information. They show that these sites provided disparate answers, with different user intent behind the questions. Based on this we’ll also provide examples of tactics for automotive SEO in Australia that each website could employ to further encourage AI chatbot visits.
Figure 3: Examples of AI prompts used to reach each car-review website.
- CarExpert
User prompts show that AI chatbots visited CarExpert mainly for information on unbiased car reviews, the latest news and general updates. It’s also been recommended as a trustworthy website for comparing new car models.
To satisfy more of this demand, the website could intensify its focus on model comparisons and create regular “state of the market” types of guides. - WhichCar
AI chatbots used WhichCar with an accent on Kia models. These model-specific queries also focus on Tassie and include information such as warranties.
The site could invite more AI chatbot traffic by creating a diverse, information-rich destination with deep-dive videos, and detailed specification tables formatted for AI chatbot consumption. - Drive
Drive is an interesting case. It obviously has excellent brand credibility, as the AI prompts show that users are specifically asking the chatbot to check its website. Conversely, the fact that it’s mentioned in all the queries could indicate that the only time an AI chatbot uses the site is when it’s explicitly asked to do so.
That aside, the site is used for a variety of prompts from car reviews and ratings to detailed specs and vehicle comparisons, and to provide general buying advice.
Drive can capitalise by emphasising structured comparison articles, easily digestible buyer guides, and maintaining a focus on expansive vehicle specifications. - Exhaust Notes
The AI prompts that led chatbots to Exhaust Notes were all focused on a single Aprilia model and pricing. It thus appears to be a trusted source for motorcycle queries. Once again there’s ambiguity in the superficial stats.
Mark Holgate explains once more: ” Significant growth points have included specific motorcycle reviews, where we were the first to market or the only review in the market, car reviews where we had the only review for a specific model year, and opinion pieces. The value of the latter has proven its worth time and time again, with massive traffic gained by focusing on specific events (like Summernats and the controversy that occurred there).”
Our recommendations would include providing constantly updated pricing tables, deepening niche information, and increasing the emphasis on other vehicles by creating schema markup for car reviews.
Key Bring Takeaways
- People are asking very detailed questions on AI chatbots.
- Car review sites need to frame content in ways that answer specific questions.
- Focusing on specific vehicle brands and models can attract niche traffic.
AI Chatbot Traffic Deep Dive (Jan–Jun 2025)
By examining AI chatbot traffic to automotive sites in more detail we can deduce how AI-friendly each one likely is.
Figure 4: AI Chatbot traffic to Australian car-review websites (Jan 2025 – Jun 2025).
Breaking down AI chatbot traffic to the automotive sites shows that CarExpert leads with 43% of the 107,900 visits going to its domain from January 2025 to July 2025. This indicates that it has AI-friendly content that it should continue to refine.
CarsGuide also has an equally respectable 34.8%. Most encouraging is that the numbers have shown a consistent rise of the period, showing that the site is effectively integrating chatbot formatting.
WhichCar and Drive make up the next tier, with 13.1% and 7.5%, respectively. Being this far off the pace suggests that both sites need to find opportunities for better AI-driven search results. Implementing structured data SEO is an example. This is where website information is provided to search engines in the form of precisely formatted code.
Exhaust Notes only gets 1.6% of AI chatbot traffic. This gels with the above data showing that it’s used for niche searches like motorcycle models. Concentrating on growing this niche-specific traffic with targeted AI content could spur growth. As Holgate says, “Our next focus point is to look at how we can achieve further engagement with AI search results, to ensure our content turns up in results in this emerging space, providing more opportunity for us to grow the Exhaust Notes Australia brand and website traffic.”
When it comes to the most used AI platforms, ChatGPT is head and shoulders above the rest, accounting for a monthly traffic average of 3,800. Perplexity was the next most popular, with 745 queries, followed by Gemini at 366.
Key Bring Takeaways
- It’s critical to format content specifically for AI chatbot consumption.
- Niche content offers opportunities to grow brand authority.
- ChatGPT is currently the leading platform for AI search.
Competitor Benchmarking of AI chatbot traffic to automotive sites
We can summarise the interpretations of the above data for a competitor benchmarking comparison:
| CarExpert | Strong AI integration, highly targeted expert content, but needs innovative channels to break current traffic plateau. |
| WhichCar | Weak paid search strategy, content overly broad—requires focused, high-intent verticals. |
| CarsGuide | Effective structured content suited for AI extraction—monitor paid-search ROI closely to avoid diminishing returns. |
| Drive | Stable yet conservative content strategy—requires clearer structure to enhance chatbot traffic. |
| Exhaust Notes | Exceptional example of niche market success through targeted paid-search and content strategies. |
Practical Strategies to Grow AI Chatbot Traffic for Automotive Sites
The data above clearly demonstrates that adapting right now to AI-driven search is critical for online survival. Australian car-review sites should implement several strategies to increase online authority in AI-driven search results. Here are some clear, actionable steps.
FAQ or Q&A sections
AI chatbots look for clear, concise and bite-sized chunks of information that answers specific questions. One of the best ways to gain authority and grow AI traffic is to create FAQ sections on all main website pages. This makes it easy for chatbots to find and display what they need.
Structured data SEO
Structured data SEO is about creating code-level information formatting in a form that search engines and chatbots can quickly digest and use. The structure is preset, so it’s simply a matter of putting the right info in the right places. This kind of schema markup for car reviews includes information structures like FAQPage schemas and HowTo schemas. Sites can use these to guide AI information extraction and grow authority. Structured data SEO isn’t just an option; it’s mandatory for visibility in the AI-driven search landscape.
Consistently accurate, up-to-date information
AI chatbots attempt to provide the latest, accurate information, and they’re constantly learning which sites are the most trustworthy. Australian car-review sites can grow their stature by continually providing updated vehicle specs and prices, and creating short editorial insights and review summaries. Niche, clearly-structured content—like that of Exhaust Notes—is a blueprint for success in AI-driven searches.
Direct collaboration with AI platforms
Websites can transmit information directly to AI platforms using so-called API feeds (Application Programming Interface). In simple terms, these are apps web developers can download and use to send and receive data at the code level, rather than via the website’s visible content. This greatly speeds up content consumption on the AI side.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are zero-click searches?
Zero-click searches are when AI shows direct answers or information on the search results page, resulting in users reading this and not clicking through to any websites.
Why is AI-driven traffic so important for automotive websites?
AI chatbot traffic to automotive websites is becoming prolific, so Australian car-review sites need to be formatted for these chatbots to capture visitors and maintain online visibility. Plus, people are increasingly relying on conversational search AI tools to make car-buying decisions, which makes it even more mission-critical to optimise for this.
How can websites optimise for automotive chatbots in Australia?
The most effective methods include clearly structuring information, including FAQ sections, implementing schema markup for car reviews, and creating concise content that’s 100% accurate and up to date.
How does schema markup enhance AI visibility?
Yes, this kind of structured data SEO directly helps AI chatbots to find and highlight the most valuable website content in AI-driven search results.
Can niche automotive websites effectively compete for AI-driven traffic?
Very much so. As we discussed above, a niche site like Exhaust Notes can very successfully compete by providing clearly structured content that’s been deliberately designed for AI extraction and display. In fact it can be easier and quicker to build authority in a niche market than in a larger one with more competitors.
AI Chatbot Traffic for Automotive Sites: TL;DR
Our bottom line is that brands slow to adapt to AI-driven search will rapidly lose visibility and traffic to competitors who embrace these strategies early.
- AI-driven chatbots make up an increasingly large percentage of search traffic in Australia.
- Properly structured, regularly updated content is critical to online visibility on AI platforms.
- Programmatic elements like schema markup are indispensable tools.
- Well-tailored and structured niche content specifically designed for AI consumption performs very well in AI-driven search results.
- Niche content tailored explicitly for user intent performs offers growth opportunities AI-driven searches.
